URLs or web addresses with respect to the Internet are known. As far as the HyperText Transport Protocol (HTTP) is concerned, these are Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) which include universal resource locators and/or universal resource names, i.e., formatted strings that identify a network resource by name, location or another predetermined characteristic. URIs throughout the rest of the text include universal resource identifiers, universal resource locators and universal resource names.
The compression of URIs in HTTP requests can provide throughput benefits by reducing the number of bytes that need to be transmitted. In any network where the uplink is shared and a contention-based access scheme is used to arbitrate transmissions, reducing the transmitted packet size makes it less likely to collide with another transmission. This is true of all variety of wireless networks, including wide-area packet data (e.g., Cellular Digital Packet Data (CDPD)), two-way paging (e.g., ReFLEX), and wireless LANs (RF and IR), as well as wired networks that provide wide-area data services, such as those emerging in the cable television industry. The URI is often a large part of the request.
Therefore, since compressing the URI may substantially reduce the probability for collision in the uplink or may provide better efficiency in bandwidth-constrained uplinks, there is a need for an efficient scheme for compressing URIs.